Beyond the Black Atlantic: Angola, The Eastern Bloc and the Cold War

Wednesday, 16 April, 2014 - 11:30

In this talk I set in dialogue a novel, Mongane Wally Serote’s Scatter the Ashes and Go (2002), and a documentary, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda (1997), to ask about the role played by the war in Angola in the cultural imaginary of African intellectuals. This retrospective view of one of the hot conflicts of the Cold War sketches out solidarities and tensions that stretch beyond the African continent, giving the Black Atlantic a more capacious understanding. These texts open up methodological questions about the study of black diasporas and postcolonial cultures during and in the aftermath of the Cold War.